Amongst the better outcomes of South Africa’s success in the World Test Championship (WTC) was a reduction in the obsession with the World Cup which had grown from an irritable rash in 1992 into a tumour which adversely affected the men’s national team more and more as each four-year cycle between events ended.
The national desire to win the World Cup is understandable but it has led to clouded judgment in player selection and tendency towards “outcomes-based preparation”, as national coach Shukri Conrad told a coaching symposium last week. The head coach stressed the need to focus on “process” rather than “results”.
Focusing on a single event in two years’ time negates the importance of winning a series or a match in two weeks’ time and nothing contributes more to a winning culture than winning regularly. Conrad’s approach to winning the WTC involved him selecting the best players in the prevailing conditions for each series and every match. He is attempting to do likewise in white ball cricket. But the board and executive which sit above him struggle to share his belief that results will take care of themselves if the processes are clear.
One of those processes involves the amount of cricket played during the domestic season, which fell to an all-time low this season. There is also the wholly unsatisfactory situation of two divisions and the impossible difference in the standard between them. There was good news and bad over the weekend as an attempt was made to address both issues.
First the good. The eight teams in Division One will be divided into two groups of four next season with each team playing four-day, first-class matches against each other at home and away. Western Province, Boland, the Warriors and Dolphins will be in one group with the Lions, Titans, North West and the newly promoted Knights in the second group.
Each team will also play one fixture against the four teams in the opposite group, which addresses the problem of playing only “coastal” fixtures or “inland” fixtures. It would mean 10 matches for each team in the first division, up from the inadequate seven.
The seven teams in Division Two will contest three-day first-class matches with a 50-over match on what would have been the fourth day.
Other tweaks will also be made to the 50-over competition but the greatest change will be in the T20 format, which will see two groups of eight teams, including a South Africa Emerging Squad, with four teams from Division One and four from Division Two in each group. There are cost-cutting reasons for using geographical proximity, but the cricketing theory is also understandable ― exposing the weaker teams to the stronger ones raises the overall standard. Theoretically.
Now for the bad news. However you pack the bags and cook the books, more cricket will cost more money. Even if the Knights and Dolphins take the N5 and N3 between Bloemfontein and Durban. And there has been no indication where the extra money will come from.
The smaller, poorer unions have expressed delight that they will be hosting the bigger, richer unions, apparently unaware that even the Wanderers, Newlands and Kingsmead are routinely empty during domestic matches. Their apparent hope that cross-division fixtures will attract crowds is naive. Even Lions-Titans derbies don’t attract crowds, no matter the length of the match or the colour of the ball.
To make domestic cricket financially sustainable will require the most fundamental change of attitude in the history of South African cricket. The despair about attracting spectators must be replaced with creative innovation. Having “free entry” to first-class games isn’t going to appeal to anybody when there are no facilities open or functioning inside the venues.
Hospitality boxes remain empty for the majority of the domestic season. Use them to “upgrade” the spectating experience. Make “work from home” areas where the self-employed or those with mundane tasks to perform can do so on their laptops while enjoying the cricket. It’s happening with significant success elsewhere in the world.
For now, cricket’s administrators have listened to the players and coaches and agreed to the need for more games. Now they also need to do the marketing and promoting for which they were employed. And the provinces must prove they can feed themselves, too, because if they can’t the financial umbilical cord to Cricket South Africa will be cut in less than two years. It will have to be. The money is running out rapidly and there will be less income in the years to come. They have said so themselves.
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